[pherk]

Very informative. We are a payments company (http://www.juspay.in) based out of India. We came to similar conclusion just after the inception of the company. Instead of building a payment gateway, we built a solution that acts as a wrapper on top of payment processors and positioned our product as a specialization in cards processing. And today, some of the biggest companies in India are using our product (1-click checkout).

Our positioning gives us better margins than processors and the icing on the cake is that we are also not exposed to fraud related risks. Settlement process in India is cumbersome and mostly manual. Being a completely engineering team, we are happy that we aren't dragged into settlements and related issues as well.

One of the big downsides for us is that we don't get to have a big float like the processors.

[ballard]

Wow. Interesting.

As having having used several at different scales in both tech and business capacities, general feedback on payment gateways is:

  - developer support (libraries, examples to get apps going quickly and sandbox APIs)
  - clear communication of due-diligence process for new accounts
  - advance notification for production changes
  - discussion of security and audit standards (makes customer due-diligence, internal selling easier)
 

Stripe and others shake things up a little whereas traditional US/multinational basically didn't care about anyone, especially customer service unless you happen to be a Fortune 100 that can yell at their mgmt at a high level.